Video: Keyboard increments

We are going to start things out by looking at a few Preferences settings; by no means, all of the Preference Settings, you will be glad to know. Just the ones I think matter most, the ones that I feel like are set wrong by default actually and this is an opportunity you and I to get on the same page-- wait this is Illustrator, for you and I to get on the same artboard. Anyway, go up to the Edit menu, choose Preferences and then choose General. On the Mac, you go to the Illustrator menu, choose Preferences and choose General or you can use the tried and true universal keyboard shortcut for getting to the Preferences command. This is universal that is throughout all the Adobe applications and that's Ctrl+K on the PC or Command+K on the Mac and that will bring up the General panel of the Preferences dialog box right here.

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Keyboard increments

We are going to start things out by looking at a few Preferences settings; by no means, all of the Preference Settings, you will be glad to know. Just the ones I think matter most, the ones that I feel like are set wrong by defaultactually and this is an opportunity you and I to get on the same page-- wait this is Illustrator, for you and I to get on the same artboard.Anyway, go up to the Edit menu, choose Preferences and then choose General. On the Mac, you go to the Illustrator menu, choose Preferences and choose Generalor you can use the tried and true universal keyboard shortcut for getting tothe Preferences command. This is universal that is throughout all the Adobeapplications and that's Ctrl+K on the PC or Command+K on the Mac and that willbring up the General panel of the Preferences dialog box right here.

Now most of these guides are really tweaky options and as I say I'm not goinginto them right now, or I'll come back to them later. Only going to visit thestuff that I think is set wrong by Default, for example, Keyboard Increment.Now the notion behind the Keyboard Increment is that when an object isselected, you can nudge it from the keyboard by pressing one of the arrow keysand by default, you are going to nudge that item 'one point' or if you pressShift along with an arrow key, you will nudge it 10 times an increment. So ten points. And that is true even if you are working in a different Unit ofMeasure. Starts off one point by default. That's a lot of movement. When youare zoomed in, that means you are really moving the object all over the place.

I prefer to work with a smaller unit of measure, I go with 0.2 and if you areworking in some other unit of measure other than point, then you want to say0.2 and then pt, like this, to indicate points and that means a fifth of a point, so that's a very tiny unit of measurement. That's a fifth of a seventysecond of an inch. So very small increments. See, the thing is you can't go down. You can't get any finer with this keyboard increment. That's why I said,it's so fine by default and then if you want bigger movements, if you want twopoint movements, for example, then you need to press Shift along with an arrowkey and you will get two point movement.

So always 10X with the Shift key down. So anyway, that's what I recommend,nothing else inside of this panel needs to be changed. I'll mention this button here. Throughout Illustrator, you will receive alert messages in response toyour various activities and the more nettlesome ones, they have a little Don'tshow again check box at the bottom of them, so that you can say please don'tever show up again but sometimes you are going to want to bring them back,after you say Don't show again, it's often very difficult to get them to comeback and again if a new user is using your machine and you want them to get asense of what's going on. Or if you just find yourself missing a warningbecause it was like well it's so irritating to have it completely door you,sometimes that happens. Then you can click on Reset All Warning Dialogs andthat way every single one of those Alert messages will be revived and will comeback. So that's just a click, then it happens just before one before you clickat that, that's what you are going to do.

All right, let's click Next. It is what I really want to click. I didn't clickReset All Warnings, let's click Next to go the next item here in the list asyou can see and that's Selection & Anchor Display. Now I'll start by justmentioning you can change the way that points--, these are anchor points insideof a path and control handles are displayed. If you don't know what those are,don't worry about it, we are of course going to come to it later. Butbasically, you are allowed to change the appearance of your anchor points andyour control handles because they look different inside of other applications.

So if you are coming to this program for free hand and you want everything tolook the same way it does in free hand, then you can select this guy right here. If you are coming from CorelDraw and so on, you may want to change these settings as well.I am working with the default settings. I just want you to see that. So tinylittle anchor points and even smaller handles that are around, that are off tothe sides here. Highlight Anchors on mouse over is a great option I think. Thatallows you to easily find your anchor points inside of your illustration and we will be using that feature, so leave that on.Its not a big deal but I recommend you go ahead and turn on Show Handles whenmultiple anchors are selected, that means you are going to see control handlesall over the place and you may find that, that kind of gets in your face and soyou can always turn it off, but it also gives you a better sense of how yourpath is constructed when we start constructing paths which you will see.

And your Snap to Point is fine the way it is right now. When you bring one pointwithin two pixels, green pixels, that is to say of another point, then they aregoing to snap together. Which is a great thing.This determines how closely you need to get to a path or point to select it.Three is fine. Here is the guy I really want you to change. Object Selection byPath Only, the deal is by default you can just click in the middle of a shape.Just click it's Fill and you will select it. So that's the easiest thing to do,right? That way you don't have to get your cursor exactly aligned to the PathOutline. The problem is as your illustration is getting more and morecomplicated, its more and more problematic to try to select through the variousshapes, two shapes below and so if you limit the selection to just the PathOutline, which is the outline around the shape, then you are going to beselecting with a lot better control and you are going to be able to followalong with me a heck of lot better.

So I just you turn that check box on. That's good for now, that's all we aregoing to do in this exercise. In the next exercise, we are going to check outsome more Preference Settings including Scratch Disk and Appearance of Black.Stay tuned.

Q: Adobe Bridge CS4 is not previewing files in the same way for me as it is in the tutorial. All I am seeing is a low-quality thumbnail of the image, not previews of each artboard. Why is there a difference between the tutorial and what I am seeing?

A: There is a different view in the tutorial because the author used a beta version of Bridge during the recording. The final release of Bridge CS4 displays thumbnails as you describe.

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